Topic: Manhattan Transfers

Five and half years ago, the Century Foundation's enormous brownstone at 41 East 70th Street nearly sold to Woody Allen and his wife, until he decided that renovating the place from offices into a house would take too much work. The house was asking $15 million.

Since then, the price of the townhouse--which Paula Del Nunzio, probably the most powerful townhouse broker in Manhattan, is calling the Rothschild Mansion, after its builder--has seesawed from $25...

Marco Stoffel is a mysterious man.

His 24-foot-wide West 12th Street townhouse, on a lovely cobblestone block, has been home to peculiar not-for-profits like the Borderline Personality Disorder Research Foundation and the Third Millennium Foundation, which partnered with Al Gore’s Current TV for a contest called “Seeds of Tolerance.” According to a press release, the winner was announced at an event with Mr. Stoffel, Mr. Gore, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Lindsay Lohan. The foundation’s International...

Melanie Lazenby, the 36-year-old Elliman broker whose father, George, starred in the wildly wonderful On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, finally has an apartment all her own. According to a deed, she just sold off the $1.85 million West Ninth Street co-op she owned with her mother, the Gannett publishing heiress Christina Matser, then bought a smaller condo at the new Superior Ink.

Ms. Lazenby, who The Times described as “tall, impeccable and fair-haired” in an...

Earlier this month, a very wealthy and very Republican slice of Florida society was thrown into a very sweaty panic when the multimillionaire attorney Scott Rothstein was accused of running a Ponzi scheme that could total more than a billion dollars. Even though Mr. Rothstein, a spiky-haired and alligator-shoed Lamborghini driver, has said he was born in the Bronx (to a condom salesman), the scandal probably won't hit Manhattan as hard as Madoff's.

But one...

The 104-year-old, 36-foot-wide, 17-bathroom, 15-bedroom, 11-fireplace mansion at 18 East 68th Street was the most expensive house in New York when it was listed last year for $64 million. Even when that tag came down in January to $54 million, the price was still higher than any Manhattan mansion had ever sold for.

It was pulled from the market in July, but is being re-listed this week with a new broker at a very new...

Earlier this year, the investor Christopher H. Browne put his 515 Park Avenue duplex on the market for $32.5 million, even though the place was basically a one-bedroom apartment. There was a guest room, to be fair, but it was smaller than the master suite’s walk-in closet.

The duplex was taken off the market in September, leaving a gaping hole in New York’s inventory of wildly expensive one-bedrooms. The house-hunter who wanted to spend an...

Back in April 2008, Abigail Disney, the mogul's grandniece, put her two 300 West End Avenue apartments on the market for a combined $13,445,000. It was an ambitious thing to do, considering that a year and a half earlier she'd paid the singer Harry Belafonte just $10.75 million for them.

The pair of nine-room co-ops, listed with mega-agent Dolly Lenz, got less pricey as the economy drooped--though the combined tag was cut only to $11.95...

The software magnate Marty Sprinzen’s $24.5 million, 4,552-square-foot, seven-room apartment at 838 Fifth Avenue, the kind of place where there’s museum-quality lighting, Venetian plaster and heated Portuguese limestone floors in the entrance gallery alone, went to contract last month, according to its Brown Harris Stevens listing.

By itself, that news wouldn’t mean much. After all, signed contracts don’t always lead to actual deals: Last month, listing information shows, an eighth-floor apartment at the supremely fancy...